Welcome

There has been a Christian church on the site of St. Peter’s for more than a thousand years, and in the 21st century the current church community still exists to serve the society around us and to offer opportunities for worship, for quiet meditation, for the exploration of spirituality and faith and for fellowship.

“We are part of the world-wide Anglican Communion, and our full title is the Parish of St. Peter de Merton with St. Cuthbert in the Diocese of St. Albans. We are committed to working co-operatively with Christian communities of any complexion and with other faiths with similar aims. As such, we participate actively in Churches Together in Bedford and in the Bedford Council of Faiths.

“We at St. Peter’s recognise an important distinction between religious needs and spiritual needs. We believe that everyone has spiritual needs – searchings, longings, questions about what it means to be human, and what life is about – but that not everyone seeks to answer these in a religious way, or by belonging to a church. However they are expressed, we consider these deep spiritual needs to be valid and important in their own right, and we believe it is central to our mission as a community-committed church to help people to voice their questions about life and its meaning and to seek answers to them, whether these answers take a ‘religious’ form or not. If this search leads people into our worshipping community, they will find a welcome, but our concern for them and our welcome to them is unconditional.